Health information technology (HIT) refers to the digitization of health information. Many HIT systems exist which use electronic health records instead of paper medical records to store patients' health information. The use of electronic health records has facilitated the portability of health information. However, many significant drawbacks exist when using existing HIT systems.
A primary drawback of current HIT systems is the lack of interoperability between different systems. For example, many different formats exist for storing and exchanging health information digitally, including HL7, XML, and CSV among others. Even when a common format is used between two systems, the use of different schemas may still prevent two systems from directly interoperating.
To address this interoperability issue, tools have been created that perform mappings between formats. These tools allow an administrator to define mappings to apply to source data to convert the source data from one format to another or from one schema to another. For example, if the source data comes from a HIT system that stores data in the HL7 format, such tools can be used to apply mappings to the source data to convert it into the XML format for use by a HIT system that stores data in the XML format.
To create mappings in current tools, however, the administrator is required to write scripts, something that is not within the toolset of many potential users of such tools. For example, most health care providers need to provide some form of interoperability between their HIT system and other HIT systems. Many of these health care providers, such as smaller clinics, may not have the personnel on staff, or the financial means, to employ an administrator with scripting skills sufficient to create such mappings.
Even if a health care provider has the ability to create mappings to provide interoperability with its HIT system, the process of writing scripts to perform such mappings is a tedious and error prone process. For these reasons, the portability of health information has not reached the levels desired by the health care industry.